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"The Poetry of Doug Holder," by Zvi A. Sesling, July 13, 2009
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Yiddish, Hot Dogs, and His Father - All Part of Poet Doug Holder's Nostalgia
By Zvi A. Sesling
Somerville resident Doug Holder, a small-press activist and local poet, is founder of the Ibbetson Street Press and the literary journal "Ibbetson Street." A co-founder of the Somerville News Writers Festival, Breakfast with the Bagel Bards, and Curator of the Newton (MA) Free Library Poetry Series, his poems have appeared in numerous magazines and he has published four collections of his own poetry and appeared in several anthologies. His recent books are Of All The Meals I Had Before (Cervena Barva Press, 2007) and No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain (sunnyoutside, 2007).
A writer of diverse poetry, he is also a Jewish poet who writes with sensitivity, nostalgia, and the memory of youth. For example, in Wallace Ave., Bronx 1965, Holder recalls a young boy's encounter with the women on his street: "Rows/of ancient Jewish mothers/like angry crustaceans/perched on lawn chairs/claws out/pinch at the peach fuzz of my flushed cheeks/I kiss the skin above their turkey necks/and listen to their code of Yiddish."
Reading these lines one can say, "Oy, I remember having to go through that - a grandmother, an aunt, they all seemed aged." Now, to the wizened Holder, the old ladies of his youth are indelibly pressed into his memory.
In another poem, he recalls a deli where he, his brother, and his father would have a hot dog, a knish, and a Doctor Brown's. Again, it is a memory that remains: "And for me/those afternoons/that warm, nostalgic/ancient hue/is all that/rings true." Doug Holder is a poet who is highly entertaining while being sensitive and true to himself. Another of his books, Wrestling With My Father (Yellow Pepper Press, 2005), is poignant and worth a read. In fact, Holder is always a good read and, unlike many poets, you will never close one of his books feeling as if something is missing. You will, however, leave asking for the next book.
Finally, Holder's A Jew and His Penny connects him to his Jewish appearance, his feeling of being estranged from non-Jews looking at him in front of the laundromat and how he avoids fulfilling the anti-Semitic canard of a Jew bobbing for a penny as if it were a one-hundred-dollar bill. It brings to mind Beethoven's piano piece entitled Rage After a Lost Penny. For Beethoven, losing a penny resulted in an angry piano solo expressing his rage. For Holder, it is his appearance and the emotions of anti-Semitism that well up from his past to remind him and the reader how bending over to pick up a penny can bring about embarrassment and ridicule. Here is Holder's particularly "Jewish" poem being published for the first time.
A Jew and His Penny
And when
I dropped a penny
in front of a laundromat
audience
with my graying
rabbinical beard,
and my
so out of place
Semitic face,
I hesitated to bow
to them
and retrieve
that coin
because I could hear
the childhood taunt
the ghosts
are still here
and they
haunt.
Zvi A. Sesling is a retired public relations executive and a poet. He has been published in numerous magazines, including Midstream and Poetica Magazine, Reflections of Jewish Thought. In 2007, he was awarded First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition in Israel.
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